The last post is the first one in nine years to have mentioned the name of my college fraternity, Phi Delta Theta. This is the second. Searching the blog I only found two mentions of the phrase “my fraternity” in previous posts. One is unflattering the other harmless. I spent four years with some of my brothers and have complicated thoughts about my time with them – too complicated for a simple post or two.
Recent events in Oklahoma have been on all fraternity men’s minds lately. I’ve been so preoccupied I have probably paid less attention to them than most. I mentioned to one of the fellows while in Mankato that I found it ironic that it had been an SAE (Sigma Alpha Epislon) chapter that had its members shout racist stupidities. That’s because forty years ago, just after many national fraternities (including mine) had dropped their Aryan membership requirements, it was our local SAE chapter that pledged a black fraternity member. Then my brother explained that the offending Oklahoma chapter had a black member!!!!!! I’ll let the exclamation points speak for me.
I was a rare exception in our blue collar fraternity. I was a legacy, by which I mean that my father had been a Phi. By custom sons of fraternity members are automatically granted the chance to become members of the fraternity. In my case I was a double pledge as my father’s father had been a Phi Delt too – three generations which ended with me.
Ah, the stories I could tell. Young men throwing lateral passes on the way to growing up. I was impressed with the growing up that had been done fifty years on. My Father had moved to Mankato one year before the old local Alpha Beta Mu went national and became one of the new Phi Delta Theta chapter’s first advisers. Had it not been for him I would not have joined. All through the reunion old fraternity brothers came up to me and extolled my Father’s virtues as a business law teacher, even one of their wives. I have written about his class in my blog.
I suspect that I’ve found it too taxing to contemplate talking about my fraternity through the years because they are organizations so laden with stereotype that it freights all story telling with too much baggage. Like having been a Republican being a Phi Delt is easy to pan. I just checked on you-tube and one of my brothers you-tubed himself biting off (or appearing to bite off) the head of a hamster. I know there are much worse crimes exposed out there but that’s what youthful hi jinks lead to. Many of my pals and I operated under the golden rule of do no harm or mostly did.
Its often said that there is a very similar congruity between corporate CEO’s and convicts. A lot of both probably got their start in fraternities. It was the CEO’s that showed up at my fiftieth reunion. I really enjoyed seeing them again after forty years.
